


Best-Laid Plans

by onward_came_the_meteors



Series: Brucemas 2020 [6]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Birthday, Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff, POV Third Person, Post-Avengers (2012), shameless fluff, the couple that does science together stays together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-19
Updated: 2020-12-19
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:55:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28171272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onward_came_the_meteors/pseuds/onward_came_the_meteors
Summary: The Avengers need the Hulk, but it's Betty's birthday and Bruce would really rather not.
Relationships: Bruce Banner/Betty Ross
Series: Brucemas 2020 [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2056074
Comments: 2
Kudos: 9
Collections: Brucemas 2020





	Best-Laid Plans

**Author's Note:**

> Don't mind me, just continuing to use the prompts how they're not intended to be used... 
> 
> Day 6, for the Betty/Bruce pairing and the prompt "birthday"

Betty woke up in steps: the sort of slow, blissful routine that was unique to days without set alarms, where she was free to drift in and out of sleep as beams of sunlight casted through the curtains and made patterns across the pillow. The cycle repeated a few times before she finally let her eyes blink open for more than a few seconds, rolling over with her hand outstretched for the bed’s other occupant.

Her hand only touched a wrinkled sheet, and if she’d been more awake, she would’ve frowned. Out of the two of them, she was definitely the early riser, and it wasn’t like either of them had anywhere to go today—

She sat up, rubbing her eyes, and that was when she finally spotted her boyfriend.

Bruce was sitting at the end of the bed, his legs draped over the side. The glow on his face reflected the light of the phone screen in his hand; he’d evidently been scrolling through it for at least a few minutes before she’d woken up.

Betty waited, propping herself up on her elbow, but since Bruce was apparently lost in whatever he was looking at, she gave in. “Morning.”

Bruce looked up, startled. “Hey. Happy birthday.” 

He smiled at that last part, but Betty didn’t miss the way he glanced quickly down at his phone as though making sure it hadn’t spontaneously detonated in his hand. 

“What’s up?” she asked.

Bruce winced, as though he’d been hoping she would linger on the birthday topic a little longer, before dropping his phone face down and—in a way that was too decisive to be convincing—saying, “Nothing.”

_ He’s always been a terrible liar.  _ She’d known that, but it was still slightly amusing to see his eyes dart to the side and then down at the bed before looking at her with an expression of what he probably thought was wide-eyed innocence even as his hands fiddled around in the blankets.

And Bruce kept talking. A valiant attempt to steer the conversation, but—sadly for him—misguided. “So, do you wanna go to that cafe place for breakfast, or do you—”

Betty leaned across the bed and stole the phone from his loose grip, effectively cutting him off.

Bruce made a halfhearted “hey” noise of protest, but Betty was already sitting up and reading over the notifications screen.

No  _ wonder _ Bruce had been distracted. His phone was positively blowing up—even as she tried to make sense of what was already there, more notifications popped up. Most of them seemed to be calls from various unlabeled numbers (S.H.I.E.L.D., most likely), but there was a sizable amount from his contacts list as well: four calls from Steve (“Cap,” with little flag and arm muscle emojis), two calls from Natasha (“Restricted”), and an impressive fourteen calls from Tony (“block later”). The only text was from “probably Clint??”, which had the cryptically non-cryptic message of  _ time 2 smash _ . With a winky face.

After digesting all that, Betty lowered the phone, looking over at Bruce with raised eyebrows.

Bruce sighed. “Okay,  _ maybe _ there’s a kind of situation going on, but the rest of them can handle it.”

“Is that why you’re getting calls from—” Betty squinted at the phone “—’the thot of thunder?’”

“Tony changed it to that,” Bruce said immediately. 

“Not the part of that sentence you should be focusing on.”

“They can handle it,” Bruce repeated. “Whatever  _ it _ is. If Earth’s Mightiest Heroes can’t deal with someone taking a day off, we’ve got bigger problems.” He sounded like he was trying to convince himself. 

And Betty appreciated the thought—really—but she’d also seen the kind of world-saving activities the Avengers got up to on what was getting to be at least a bi-monthly basis. Shutting down intergalactic wormholes and defeating armies of mutated alien robots and hunting down evil mind-control magic-tech—those weren’t exactly the types of things that could be scheduled around. It would be pretty hard to enjoy a birthday coffee date when all the news stations were blaring about the apocalypse happening in the next district over.

And from what she’d seen, the Avengers wouldn’t call the Hulk out lightly. Well, maybe Tony would. And Thor had always shown a little too much enthusiasm about the prospect of fighting a more equal opponent. And she couldn’t really make any judgments about Clint. But Steve and Natasha wouldn’t call the Hulk out lightly, and that meant that whatever was going on, the Avengers needed all hands on deck. Including the overly large green ones. 

“This wasn’t a scheduled mission, was it?” Betty asked, already knowing the answer.

“No.”

“You know they only ask for you when the problem is… Hulk-sized.”

“They can manage,” Bruce said again, but he still didn’t look sure. He looked a very long way from sure, actually, like it was a completely alien concept only visible by telescope. And he was still folding and unfolding the same corner of blanket seemingly without realizing what he was doing.

Betty slid out of bed.

“Where are you going.”

“Getting dressed.” She pulled open a drawer as she spoke—socks first, her bare feet were cold on the floor. “I don’t think whatever-the-acronym-is secret agency people would appreciate me showing up in my pajamas.”

“You really don’t have to—” Bruce started, but Betty was already reaching over to press the voicemail button.

The first message that played was from Steve Rogers. Indistinct crashes and shouts were going off in the background, and Steve himself was out of breath, but the Captain America could still be heard in his voice. 

“Doctor Banner—” There was another, louder, crash, and Steve cut himself off to yell at someone out of range. “I said  _ south _ of the station! South!” A sound like metal clanging against metal and a staticky screech before he was back. “Bruce. We’re in some trouble.” Clang. Crash. “I don’t know what you’re doing or why the hell you haven’t answered our calls, but we could really  _ really _ use some anger right now and—” He was cut off again, this time by a muffled voice who must’ve been standing next to him. “What? How many?” The muffled voice said something else, and a frustrated sigh set off another round of static before Steve went back to addressing Bruce. “The weapons here, they’re shooting some kind of… of chemical substance thing, some—Tony, there’s no way I’m gonna be able to pronounce that—the kind that disintegrates stuff, all right? And people! So, Bruce, if you don’t mind—”

What sounded like an explosion erupted in the background, and there was the unmistakable beginning of a curse before the call disconnected. 

Betty folded her arms. “That doesn’t sound like something  _ either _ of us could help with?” 

Bruce mumbled something inaudible.

So she pressed. “I don’t have a suit, but I have a lab coat and a degree in cellular biology—and helping Captain America not get disintegrated seems like a moral obligation, don’t you think?”

Bruce shook his head. “No. I mean, yeah, it is, kinda, but…” He tipped his head back and stared at the ceiling before looking back at her. “I know you’re going to yell at me for saying this, but I just don’t want you to be in danger. Not when you don’t have to be.”

Betty didn’t pause in pulling clothes out of the drawer. “Are you going?”

“I’ll stay here in a heartbeat, but it sounds like they’re in a lot of trouble—”

“Then I’m coming.” She finally located her jacket and yanked it out, turning slightly to be met with the obvious defeat on Bruce’s face.

“So you can see me punching out windows and eating street signs?” he asked after a beat.

_ Got him. _

“Trust me.” Betty grinned. “I’m used to it.”

She pulled on her jacket, Bruce disappearing from view for a moment as her gaze was obscured by fabric, and so she only heard his slightly petulant tone when he said, “It’s  _ embarrassing. _ And it’s your birthday.”

Betty would be lying if she claimed not to hesitate at that, not to feel a slight pang at the thought of spending the day surrounded by stress and chaos rather than planned celebration, but shook it off quick enough. This was important—and it wasn’t like she and Bruce hadn’t ever skipped over their share of holidays and events and…  _ sleeping _ back when they were working on their gamma radiation project. She particularly remembered the one time she’d paused in what was for sure going to be another breakthrough to take out the recycling, only to find out from the sounds of parties elsewhere on campus that it was now 1998. This shouldn’t be any different—only it was in the name of saving the world through smashing instead of science. 

Well, science would play a part too, if she had anything to say about it.

“Are you still sitting there?” she asked, heading for the door. “Come on, I’ll get the keys.”

She didn’t look over her shoulder, but she knew Bruce was following her.

* * *

The car thudded and bounced over the bumps in the road, which was steadily becoming less and less of a road and more and more of a dirt strip with the occasional handful of gravel tossed on top. The city had been left behind a while ago, leaving them with very little to distract from the approaching superhero battle that they were, at some point, going to reach.

And reach soon, according to the GPS. They’d managed to pinpoint the location of the fight from one of Natasha’s messages, after Bruce had actually listened to the rest of his voicemail (and how, on a team with geniuses, soldiers, and secret agents, had Natasha been the only one to think about giving coordinates?), and they should’ve been coming up on it any minute. 

Betty was pretty sure she’d know the right place when she saw it, though. 

It hadn’t been hard to decide who was driving—Betty had taken one look at Bruce almost visibly vibrating with tension and slid into the driver’s seat. He hadn’t argued—just buckled up. 

_ Any minute now. _ They both knew it; Betty kept glancing out the window at every shadow, every wind-blown tree branch, every crunch of tire against road that was  _ suspiciously louder, I swear I heard something this time _ ; and Bruce hadn’t been able to sit still since they’d started driving, shifting around as though preparing his body for the impending transformation.

Somebody needed to break the silence. 

“So,” she said, and Bruce immediately looked up. “Still want to go to that cafe later?”

Bruce seemed to take a second to process her words, his eyes flicking to the road ahead of them as though double-checking there hadn’t been any flashes of lightning or repulsors or flying pieces of metal, but then he relaxed back against the seat. “Far be it from me to turn that down.”

They were coming up on a hill now; Betty steered the car up the curve. “That’s the place that gives you a free muffin on your birthday, right?”

“Think so. What’re you getting?”

“Breakfast, ob—”

There was a wrenching sound, and Betty slammed on the brake as an enormous chunk of what looked like metal went careening through the air and crashed down on the side of the road, at least twice as big as the car that was now skidding crazily from side to side.

Sky-road-sky-grass and then the tires jolted into the air and  _ are we going to tip over— _

She was tossed upward in her seat, her head hitting the roof before the tires slammed back down and the car finally, mercifully, stopped. Half on and half off the road, yes, spun sideways to avoid the aforementioned enormous chunk of metal (that was now starting to spark and hiss and do other things that made getting as far away as possible a very attractive option), but stopped. 

Betty let out a slow breath as she sat up straight again, shifting the car into park. Now that she was listening for it, she could make out faint explosions, cracks, booms: all the noises that sounded like they should come with their own floating pop art bubbles. Squinting out the window, hints of fiery bursts flared just above the nearest clump of trees, and there seemed to be shiny  _ somethings _ flying around in the sky—

There was rustling to her right, and she turned to find Bruce shakily sitting up as well. There was no trace of green in his eyes—he’d been through too much to be rattled by an almost-car-accident—but they fell on Betty with clear anxiety.

She started to speak at the same moment he opened his mouth. “Are you okay?” Then, again in unison: “Yeah, I’m—” “I’m fine—”

“Good,” she said quickly. “That’s good.”

Both of them stared out the window at the sparking metal.

“The roads out here really are a nightmare,” Betty finally said, and Bruce winced.

“I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have to deal with this, you didn’t sign up for—”

“Yes, I did,” Betty interrupted. “We’re never going to have the most normal of lives, but, you know—” she gestured vaguely outside just as what looked like a laser (they had  _ lasers  _ now?) beamed up from the distant trees “—I’ve learned to roll with it.”

And she had. Through helping Bruce flee the military, through watching from a destroyed helicopter as he—as Hulk—did his best to keep Harlem as non-smashed as possible, through keeping both eyes fixed on the TV as an emergency broadcast of aliens attacking New York City played and deciding that taking a chance, while infinitely more risky, was maybe closer to what she really wanted. And Betty was a scientist. She’d calculated the variables of that decision, and it hadn’t proved itself wrong yet.

Not even with this new data point.

Bruce was nodding. “Yeah, rolling with it really is the only—”

A crash sounded—still in the distance, but somehow closer than before—and what was definitely actual lightning zigzagged down from the sky to meet it with a deafening  _ crack. _

They both jumped. 

“Are you getting out?” Betty asked, and Bruce seemed to snap into it.

“Shit, yeah, hang on.”

The car doors slammed in tandem, and the two of them made their way down the hill, picking up the pace as explosions continued to rock the countryside.

* * *

_ At least _ , Betty thought as she reached out to grab Bruce’s sleeve, stopping him from stumbling out into the middle of the chaos before them.  _ The headlines won’t have any trouble telling the good guys from the bad guys. _

The Avengers were fighting some sort of huge flying robots, the things pouring out and multiplying from seemingly thin air. A yellowish liquid sprayed from canisters mounted on metallic arms—unfamiliar at a glance, but it wasn’t hard to guess what it was, not when all five Avengers were twisting and diving in order to avoid it and the grass hissed and shriveled where the droplets hit the ground. From the blackened holes in the surrounding trees and field, they’d been fighting these things for a while.

At first, it was hard to pick out specific shapes among the general haze of light-color-sound-fire-shadow-shouting- _ BOOM _ , but then a red blur soared over their heads, and Betty’s gaze adjusted to see Iron Man opening his hands to line up a shot at one of the robots. The blue burst lit up a small reflective object spinning back from where it had dented a metal chest, and the shield returned to Captain America’s hand as he leapt from outcroppings of rock and slammed into his opponents as hard as he could. It was more difficult to spot Black Widow at first, but then she was dropping out of the air from where she’d dangled from a robot’s leg, landing in a smooth roll and up again and throwing a punch in the same movement. Where there was lightning, there was thunder, and lightning was currently surrounding Thor like a halo as he shot through the air, his hammer firm in front of him like a fist as electricity crackled in his wake. She couldn’t even see Hawkeye, but those arrows were coming from  _ somewhere _ , little red lights on the tips blink-blink-blinking before detonating in a massive blast. 

Even with all that, however, the robots outnumbered the team by a ridiculous amount, and even the few of them that were lying in lifeless heaps in the bushes were overshadowed by the way the surviving robots that shrugged off arrowheads and shields and punches like they were nothing—and somehow, they kept coming.

It was no wonder they’d called Bruce.

_ It is weird, though—seeing them fight out here instead of surrounded by skyscrapers. _

Betty had been standing staring at the fight with an open mouth, and it was Bruce’s turn to tug on her sleeve and draw her attention toward an element that had previously gone unnoticed. 

And no one could blame her, really; who would pay attention to a couple black S.H.I.E.L.D.-logo-stamped cars when Iron Man was bouncing repulsor blasts off Captain America’s shield and Thor was giving Black Widow a ride over the heads of evil flying robots?

The S.H.I.E.L.D. agents that had stepped out of their cars (which was all of them, since nobody joined a secret agency like that unless they didn’t have a problem with being in the literal line of fire) weren’t doing much besides shout authoritative-sounding code words into their com devices, but options were limited when dealing with… yeah, dealing with an Avengers-level threat. And so they noticed immediately when Betty and Bruce hurried over.

It was more than a little difficult to explain why Bruce hadn’t gotten here earlier and why Betty was there at all with the cacophony of battle going on around them, but after a rock the size of the quinjet went hurtling over the top of their heads to carve a skidding line halfway down the hill, they all prioritized. 

Bruce handed Betty his glasses and leaned up for a quick kiss. She barely had time to return it before he was pulling away and saying, “ _ Promise _ I’ll make this up to you later.”

The transformation was almost instantaneous: one moment, Bruce was standing there and letting his eyes slip shut; the next, green veins were creeping over his skin as muscles bulged and stretched; and the next, the Hulk was standing up straight in the shreds of Bruce’s clothes.

The S.H.I.E.L.D. agents collectively scurried back as Hulk swung his gaze in their direction, but Betty didn’t move.

Green eyes met hers, and then Hulk’s mouth cracked into a smile. “Betty!”

Betty smiled back, feeling the tremors in the earth as Hulk shifted on his feet. She pointed over his shoulder in the direction of the fight. “Go get ‘em.” 

Hulk gave a single nod, and then he was off, moving in impossibly high leaps and bounds over the boulders and dips in the ground, joining into the fight seamlessly and serving a knockout punch to the first robot to cross his path. 

The rest of the team’s reactions were too far away—and too muffled by continued battle sounds—to make out, but Iron Man’s whoop was the exception. He whirled around so that he and Hulk were at each other’s backs, both acting as shields as they jointly took out a couple more robots. Captain America managed a quick clap on the arm as he raced by, and Thor’s wide grin was especially lit up by the electricity still surging around him.

Once it was clear that the superheroes were well and truly occupied, Betty turned her attention back to the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents. “Is anyone working to counteract that?”

She pointed to the yellow substance that the robots were still shooting, just as Black Widow narrowly dodged a spray of it. 

One of the agents—a man in glasses—was the first to answer her. “Yes, of course. We were able to reclaim the enemies’ lab—”

“Thor electrocuted  _ everything _ ,” another agent said, her voice tinged with awe.

“—and we’ve got several scientists working as we speak,” the first agent finished.

Betty nodded. “Great. Which way?”

* * *

It had been either half an hour or several days—at least it felt like it—before Betty could say that she was reasonably confident in this newest neutralizing agent. There was a surprising lot to work with here—in the enemy lab in the basement of what had supposedly been an abandoned warehouse up until it started spitting out chemical-warfare-inducing robots—despite the large cracks, chunks of fallen ceiling, and burn marks on the walls that were definitely  _ not _ proper regulation, and it certainly didn’t hurt that they had, er… rather a large supply of available samples to work with.

(Probably terrifying for the Avengers trying not to get liquefied by the stuff, but very helpful for the people trying to study the stuff).

She had to be immensely careful when handling the substance, and every battle noise filtering through this basement’s ventilation system made her start, but the sooner she could figure out how to counteract the chemical, the sooner the robots could be disabled—or at least disarmed—and the Avengers could wrap up the fight.

True to their word, S.H.I.E.L.D. did indeed have other scientists working on the neutralizer, and she was just talking to one of them about the specific sequence of compounds in the substance bilayer when she heard the door open behind them.

Doors opening halfway through a normal lab experiment? Highly frowned upon.

Doors opening halfway through a lab experiment taking place in the abandoned basement lair of this week’s supervillain while the Avengers kicked ass outside?

Nothing short of panic-inducing.

Betty was wondering if there was any possible way one of the robots could’ve squeezed down the stairs when a familiar voice stopped her.

“‘Scuse me, I’m looking for a Doctor Ross?”

She turned, a relieved smile already on her face, to see Bruce hovering in the doorway, his ragged pair of pants holding on for dear life ridiculously out of place in this room full of lab coats and protective eyewear. 

As though he were reading her mind (or maybe just the expressions of the S.H.I.E.L.D. scientists), Bruce reached out and grabbed an extra lab coat from a hook. 

He nodded when he caught her looking at him. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Betty echoed. “How’s it going out there?”

Her hopes that the battle might have been over entirely vanished with the extremely loud  _ thud _ that sounded almost exactly like a roughly human-sized hunk of metal getting thrown into the side of a building.

“It’s… going. Okay. No one’s dead yet.”

Betty waited, but apparently that was all she was getting. “Well, that was very descriptive of—”

Someone cleared their throat from behind her, and Betty turned to see one of the scientists pointedly looking at the equipment on the desk and then up at her and Bruce. 

_ Right. Time-sensitive. _

Betty waved her hand at Bruce in a “come on” gesture before sliding back up to the lab table, scooping up a pair of tongs and angling them over the beaker. “Hold this steady for me?”

Bruce did so, coming up so that he was standing right over her shoulder. She could feel his breaths moving in and out behind her, and bumped into him a little, teasingly, before she caught the eye of the same S.H.I.E.L.D. scientist and quickly looked away. 

She poured out the latest sample, the liquid making a hissing noise as it emptied into the beaker, and she was about to tell Bruce to put goggles on when she saw that he already had.

There was the faintest bit of green still visible in the irises behind the goggles. Just another side effect besides the dark-ringed eyes and the slumped shoulders and the slight, almost imperceptible shaking that nobody else would have noticed if they hadn’t known to look for it. Hadn’t become intimately familiar with what the aftermath of a transformation looked like—how different it was from the vitality-filled, energy-filled, supernova of radiation-powered strength. 

“So what brings you here?” she asked after a few silent moments of filling beakers and taking measurements. 

Bruce shrugged. “I guess Hulk didn’t want to come back out after he got hit with some of that.” He nodded to one of the still-hissing yellowish samples.

Betty would have dropped her tongs had she not been  _ extremely _ well-practiced. “He  _ what now? _ ”

“I’m okay,” Bruce was quick to reassure, and it was clear enough from looking at him that it was the truth: nothing more out of the ordinary than a few scrapes and bruises, a few tracks of grime clinging to his skin. “He just…” He tilted his head as though listening to something. “Yeah, he doesn’t wanna play right now. So I thought I could still be useful as a biochemist.”

“Well, I don’t know about that.” Betty smiled playfully. “I mean, we  _ are _ almost done here and everything…” She patted a blank stretch of table beside her. “Pull up a stool.”

Bruce did so. “I really don’t think this is how you wanted to spend your birthday.”

Betty shrugged. “It wasn’t an important one, anyway.”

“All of them are.”

It really was a shame that kissing him while holding a live chemical sample would be so highly inadvisable. 

“Well, this makes it more interesting,” she said instead. She pointed to a few of the readings on one of the fancy high-tech monitors they had down here. “Plus, I’ve already got some ideas on how I can incorporate the chemical bond structure here into one of my projects.”

“You’re talking medical applications?”

“I’m talking  _ everything _ applications.”

Bruce smiled.

“After we celebrate my birthday, of course,” Betty added.

“Something tells me that cafe isn’t serving breakfast anymore.”

“Now, that is the talk of a nonbeliever.”

“So… waffles and birthday cake?”

“Nothing wrong with that.” Betty grinned. “Unless you think the rest of your super-friends are going to want to grab pizza or something. I’ve heard you guys have a tradition?”

Bruce shook his head, groaning a little, but a smile still peeked out. It was the truth, after all—how many times had Betty gotten a phone call two hours after a mission (There was a fifty percent chance of it actually being Bruce calling her and a fifty percent chance of it being Tony or Natasha stealing Bruce’s phone after he’d passed out cold on the sidewalk… and, once, it had been Thor, which was not an experience she wanted to repeat. Even if it had taken her mind a bit off the worry as she focused on trying to teach the god of thunder how to take himself off speakerphone) and been told that the fight was done, all members of the team were accounted for, and they were currently regrouping at whatever local restaurant had been the least devastated by collateral damage and/or had the shiniest sign for Tony to latch onto?

It really was a unique experience, picking up her half-naked and half-passed-out Avenger boyfriend from the parking lot of a Denny’s. 

“I think they’ll understand if we take some alone time,” Bruce said at last.

Betty smiled. “I’m inclined to agree.”

Test tubes clinked together as their hands met.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
